This is a recently translated collection by the Japanese writer Yukiko Motoya. You should read the first story and just decide from there. The tone of that story and the weird, curious, funny, and subtle tone of the lead story will basically sell you on the book or usher you aside. In the opening story, a married woman who feels like her husband is no longer paying attention to her takes up an offer for 100 free gym lessons not to lose weight as the trainer originally assumes, but to become a bodybuilder. She works out very hard, she drinks a lot of protein shakes, and slowly, but surely becomes muscular (and in her mind very differently shaped) in order to put it to the test if her husband will notice.
There’s another long story that sits in the middle of the colleciton in which a woman tells the story of her husband, who has the passive ability to shape the world around him — stones by his bedside, the cat, and ultimately her too — to look more and more like his face. The stories are all richer than they have any right to be, in that they are weird, but all go beyond the requisite playing out of a conceit, but a richer world in which the conceit also exists. I am looking forward to more of her weird little books coming out in the future on the back of this one.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Lonesome-Bodybuilder-Stories-Yukiko-Motoya-ebook/dp/B079QHF3X8/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3AU7EBJNAN446&dchild=1&keywords=the+lonesome+bodybuilder&qid=1586988575&sprefix=the+lonesome%2Caps%2C363&sr=8-1)
